Solution: Party of Reason and Brainpower Program

What most jeopardizes every one of us is, curiously enough, wholly within our control. 100%. Moreover, comprehensive, rational solutions are affordable, may be sequenced, and every dollar stays home – a bargain at half the cost of Iraq. You just have to value rationality and intellectual capital, two “national resources” more beset than even compromised farmland, rivers, clean air or water. Yet the galactic, infrastructure task – to refurbish top schools, universities, and research centers – remains invisible, off the media radar. In the real world, there’s not much more from the Obama crew, aside from reversing stem cell and not enough for alternative energy.

America’s not just getter dumber and less literate, while dumbing down the next generation: we appear willfully blind to how rapidly and profoundly the key engine for our high living standards is slipping away. Whether running a family or a conglomerate, you can’t fix stupidity, noteworthy for not learning from failure. Terrorists may be stuck in actual caves, but we are constrained in narrow mental caves.

Intellectual Capital Rules

The crucial imperative is feeding intellectual capital across the boards, from K through advanced studies, public and private. Do we need another Sputnik to rouse us from smugness? Or dispel corrosive anti-government bigotry, or learn technological revolutions don’t come praying for the Rapture? Nor is democracy advanced by equating taxation with thievery, rejecting majority rule, or talking up new civil wars with secession nonsense. These sorry outcomes follow not educating and informing the populace about what defines a citizen and what honors America.

Rational adults simply don’t argue whether or not expertise, training, and creativity are sorta nice-to-have luxuries. They know they are imperative national must-haves. Either we invest in problem-solving – to then address whatever else comes up – or we fail twice, defeated by ourselves and unpredictable destiny. With all respect for health reform, bodies don’t solve problems, brains do, especially by fostering emergent genius. Second-class education guarantees we become, except for a fortressed elite, a second-class nation trapped in a third-class life.

Historic resources, such as ready labor and capital allowed us to turn great farmland and extensive minerals into enormous wealth. But so did extraordinary state and federal commitments to train the best and the brightest. Not achieved – talking to you, John McCain – by tapping the worst and the dimmest.

We Are What We Know

Unarguably, government funding drove the most extraordinary surge of widespread affluence in world history, ours from the late ‘40’s until the ‘80’s. What helped was that war hadn’t destroyed our industrial power, but science and learning was kickstarted by the Sputnik shock, sending billions into education.

The answer doesn't take rocket science. Needed today is a Party of Reason, where rationality honored by a critical mass establishes consensus about ultimate problems – and sets forth legitimate, serious solutions for debate. Rational adults define a minority besieged by the reigning, unholy alliance in charge: super-rich, rightwing, big business reactionaries allied with small-town evangelicals. Thence cometh our anti-intellectual, anti-education politics that scorns learning. Keep ‘em dumb and they don’t know when they’re getting taken.

Forget partisanship or terrorism or earthquake as the worst threats for the ultimate jeopardy comes from the primacy of unreason, of faith cemented with ideology and big bucks. Since the 1980’s, America has morphed into a dubious experiment testing how long an advanced country will survive our own torrents of non-rationality and irrationality.

Unsolved Disasters Remain

If “reason is the passion for order,” from George Santayana, then unreason is the passion for disorder. While even a nation's best laid plans fail, to begin by defying reality guarantees disaster, whatever your wishful thinking, trust in the Lord, or making it up as you go along. Said White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, “It's hard to negotiate with the irrational.” It’s hard to do anything partnered with the non-rational or the irrational.

The distinction is not without interest. The non-rational denies evidence or efficacy, refusing to learn from failure. Denying global warming, for example, or not reducing pollution while quibbling how much is man-made. Or subsidizing dinosaur fossil fuel extraction, vs. underfunding new energy. Democrats are not rational when worshiping pointless bipartisanship, refusing to redefine Bush-Cheney fictions on terrorism or taking on their frontal attack against the Constitution, civil liberties, or the advocacy of torture, abuse, and lawless invasions. Whether from blindness, cowardice or expediency, manifest denial by the party in power worsens whatever is already broken.

For the GOP, lying about WMDs or Saddam and 9/11, death panels or Obama the non-citizen, is hardly non-rational when serving explicit objectives. Deception forever served Bush-Cheney, achieving every major administration goal: 1) trashing government as problem-solver (with bankruptcy), 2) deregulation, 3) top-down tax reduction, 4) government intrusion in citizen privacy, 5) launching at will, imperial invasions over oil and staging areas, 6) violating church-state lines by fund religion, 7) denial of minority and gay rights, and 8) billions in no-bid corporate payouts to security, defense and anti-terrorism players. However deranged Dick and Liz Cheney sound, there is method to their madness.

Look no further than Sarah Palin for the poster child of public irrationality, alleging foreign policy expertise because Russia’s next to Alaska, where attacks of course will first come. What distinguishes Palin is weird alchemy: she makes a virtue of the irrational and the ignorant, evidence of her mavericky independence. That Palin glories in not knowing reifies her Orwellian equation: never let ignorance get in the way of status, power, money, or celebrity.

Ditto Tea Partyers, whose taxes are less or unchanged for 15 years, yet who rail against taxation as death sentence. Likewise, the irrational bellow, “keep that government takeover away from my Medicare.” Anti-abortionists who “honor life” by murdering doctors epitomize irrationality, like airborne terrorists crashing into offices to “protest” unfairness. Is it not irrational to claim God speaks in your ear or punishes with earthquakes a zealot's delusion of sinners?

You Can’t Fix Stupid

When else has there been this much contempt for thinking – or religious mania, open ignorance about science, history, and technology, disdain for other people’s rights, even wholesale hatred of one’s government and country? Torrents of stupidity are ticking time-bombs, guaranteed to dissolve the very glue – core beliefs like one-man, one vote, majority rule or that elections matter – that defined our national community for 200 years.

As with prejudice and hate, you have to be taught ignorance and tunnel vision. Willful ignorance is an active state, rigid devotion to fear-laden, reductionist mindsets that undermine consensus and resolution. New-born babies are less “ignorant” than a mass of Tea Partyers, or those who pray Palin becomes president. What makes the fiercely ignorant dangerous is they know so little yet are dead certain they know so much.

Either America develops a Party of Reason, and a full commitment to enlightenment and the innovative brainpower I call intellectual capital, or say hello to the land of the unfree and home of the stupid. A mind is a terrible thing to waste. A hundred minds, that much worse.